Being the successor of the Gameboy Color, GBA was one of the most advanced handheld video-game consoles released by Nintendo back to 2001. It quickly became the modern flagship of sprite-based (2D) games and its hardware was comparable to the superb Super NES. Having that feature it had proven that sprite-based technology could improve and live side by side with the 3D games of the day's consoles. There is a huge collection of SNES-style games and ports for the console. Nintendo decided to have its successor (the Nintendo DS released after GBA SP model) backwards compatible with GBA games! Note also that, the GBA apart of its main CPU uses a co-processor based on Z80 in order to play the older Gameboy Color games too. The successor of the original GBA was the GBA SP, featuring same hardware but smaller form-factor, a built-in light and rechargeable battery in a clamshell-unit.